VIRGIN ON THE RIDICULOUS(LY EXPENSIVE) – If there were no buyers, there would be no sellers, but nevertheless stories like this make me feel quite sad:

An 18-year old has put her virginity on an infamous auction website that claims to have doctors who verify the girls have not had sex.

Kim, who is half Austrian and half German, said she has signed up to the sinister site Cinderella Escorts in order to buy a flat, car and to pay for her studies, The Sunreports.While for many people, their first time should be something special, Kim is going for the big money. Bidding for the 173cm-tall Kim starts at £86,640 ($150,531) — 20 per cent goes as a fee to Cinderella Escorts, according to local media.

The Cinderella Escorts website says virginity is proven with a doctor’s certificate and a potential buyer can also do their own tests to “inspect” the girl…

The student was inspired by Aleexandra Khefren, an 18-year-old Romanian model who sold her virginity for £2 million ($3.47 million) to an unnamed businessman from Hong Kong…

While the auction caused a great deal of controversy, the publicity surrounding it led to a flurry of high bids. Local media reported the man behind Germany’s most famous escort website is a 26-year-old German who still lives in his mother’s basement.

Jan Zakobielski outed himself as the man behind the multi-million pound operation which he runs from his parents’ house, both of them unaware of his business.

While I would like to commend this young Gen Y German – clearly actually Polish or of recent Polish extraction – for his spirit of entrepreneurship, which at 20 per cent cut has already earned him a fortune, I don’t think I can in good conscience. Also – move the f out of your parents’ basement, you little twerp; you can clearly afford it.

The prices might be quite astronomical, but let us not kid ourselves the principle is anything new. Virginity has been much prized in most cultures throughout the history, though far from paying for it, the groom could expect the bride’s family, through dowry, to pay him for the pleasure, so to speak. Now women are able to turn the tables on the patriarchy and monetise this clearly sought after attribute, but I’m not sure if that’s really the sort of social progress that we should be cheering on. The selling of virginity is not something new or rare either, the difference being that the model-looking girls like Aleexandra or Kim (in the picture below) are able to get infinitely more money for it than the 12-year olds prostituted in the 19th century London, or the just pubescent Cambodian and Burmese girls can today throughout the darkest recesses of Asia’s sex tourism industry. Once again, if there were no buyers, there would be no sellers. As we frown upon those few equally entrepreneurial Millennial women, we should perhaps reserve most of the scorn for the male clients.